Lisey's Story(82)

"No, this has to do with donating Scott's old papers." And in a way, it was the truth. Because no matter how the business with Dooley/McCool turned out, she wanted Scott's study emptied. No more dawdling. Let the papers go to Pitt, that was undoubtedly where they belonged, but with the stipulation that her professor pal should have nothing to do with them. Woodsmucky could go hang.

"Oh," Darla said, sounding suitably impressed. "Well, in that case..."

"I'll join you if I can," Lisey repeated. "If not, I'll see you both this afternoon, at Greenlawn."

That was jake with Darla. She passed on Canty's flight information, which Lisey obediently wrote down. Hell, she supposed she might even go down to Portland. At the very least it would get her out of the house - away from the phone, the cedar box, and most of the memories that now seemed poised above her head like the contents of some terrible sagging pi?ata.

And then, before she could stop it, one more fell out. She thought: You didn't just go out from under the willow into the snow, Lisey. There was a little more to it than that. He took you -

"NO!" she shouted, and slapped the table. The sound of herself shouting was frightening but it did the trick, lopped off the dangerous train of thought cleanly and completely. It might grow back, though - that was the trouble.

Lisey looked at the cedar box sitting on the table. It was the look a woman might give a well-loved dog that has bitten her for no particular reason. Back under the bed with you, she thought. Back under the mein gott bed, and then what?

"Bool-the-end, that's what," she said. Then she left the house, crossing the dooryard to the barn, holding the cedar box out before her as if it contained something either breakable or highly explosive.

2

Her office door stood open. From its foot a bright rectangle of electric light lay across the barn floor. The last time Lisey had been in there, she'd left laughing. What she didn't remember was if she'd left the door open or shut. She thought the light had been off, thought she'd never turned it on in the first place. On the other hand, at one point she'd been absolutely positive that Good Ma's cedar box had been in the attic, hadn't she? Was it possible one of the deputies had gone in there for a peek and left the light on? Lisey supposed it was. She supposed anything was possible.

Clutching the cedar box to her middle almost protectively, she went to the open office door and looked in. It was empty... appeared to be empty...but...

Without the least self-consciousness, she applied one eye to the crack between the jamb and the door. "Zack McCool" wasn't standing back there. No one was. But when she looked into the office again, she could see that the answering machine's message window was once more lit up with a bright red 1. She went in, tucked the box under one arm, and pushed the PLAY button. There was a moment of silence, and then Jim Dooley's calm voice spoke.

"Missus, I thought we agreed on eight o'clock last night," he said. "Now I see cops around the place. Seems like you don't understand how serious this bi'ness is, although I sh'd think a dead cat in a mailbox would be pretty hard to misunderstand." A pause. She looked down at the answering machine, fascinated. I can hear him breathing, she thought. "I'll be seeing you, Missus," he said.

"Smuck you," she whispered.

"Now Missus, that ain't -  isn't - nice," said Jim Dooley, and for a moment she thought the answering machine had, well, answered her. Then she realized this second version of Dooley's voice was in living color, so to speak, and had come from behind her. Once again feeling like an inhabitant in one of her own dreams, Lisey Landon turned around to face him.

3

She was dismayed by his ordinariness. Even standing in the doorway of her little neverwas barn office with a gun in one hand (he had what looked like a lunch-sack in the other), she wasn't sure she could have picked him out of a police lineup, assuming the other men in it were also slim, dressed in summerweight khaki workclothes, and wearing Portland Sea Dogs baseball caps. His face was narrow and unlined, the eyes bright blue - the face of a million Yankees, in other words, not to mention six or seven million hillbilly men from the mid-and deep South. He might have been six feet tall; he might have been a little under. The lick of hair which escaped the ball cap's round rim was an unremarkable sandy brown.

Lisey looked into the black eye of the pistol he held and felt the strength run out of her legs. This was no cheap hockshop .22, this was the real deal, a big automatic (she thought it was an automatic) that would make a big hole. She sat down on the edge of her desk. If the desk hadn't been there, she was pretty sure she would have gone sprawling on the floor. For a moment she was almost positive she was going to wet her pants, but she managed to hold her water. For the time being, at least.

"Take what you want," she whispered through lips that felt Novocain-numb. "Take all of it."

"Come upstairs, Missus," he said. "We'll talk about it upstairs."

The idea of being in Scott's study with this man filled her with horror and revulsion.

"No. Just take his papers and go. Leave me alone."

He stared at her patiently. At first glance he looked thirty-five. Then you saw the little fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and mouth and realized he was five more than that, five at least. "Upstairs, Missus, unless you want to start this with a bullet in the foot. That'd be a painful way to talk bi'ness. There's a lot of bones and tendons in a person's foot."